Don’t get stuck in a content rut, this week’s DistilledLive video

When you realise something works in the online world, it’s easy to keep at it and get stuck in a content rut.

For this week’s DistilledLive, Jess and Britt maximise the perks of being in the same office (and time zone) by taking a look beyond competitor’s borders when it comes to approaching your content. The PR pair also dish out some practical applications on how to get started.

Over to you, dear reader

Where are you looking to find your audience and how are you speaking to them? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

DistilledLive | Building a multifaceted approach

Jess: Hi, and welcome to Distilled Live. My name’s Jess and this is Britt and we are going to talk to you today about problems with using one channel to communicate and to promote a strategy.

Britt: Yes. A lot of companies, when they find something that works they jump on that tactic and it’s like a revolving door. You start doing churn and burn type promotions where you realize something works, and it’s sticky, and it’s creating the results that you want, and you keep at it. And you’re like, ‘Okay this is working, let’s keep doing it’. Ultimately, you get stuck in a rut. We’re not saying that you should stop what you’re doing if it works. We’re saying that maybe you should think outside of the box and look beyond the borders of what everybody else is doing.

Jess: Yeah. There are a few problems with this. One is it really limits creativity. You don’t want to be stuck in a job doing the same thing over and over again. The other thing is that it kind of runs dry, so it stops talking to the audience that you want to talk to. They get bored with it. So you really want to be looking into other tactics and it’s kind of like with the infographic. It got trendy. Everybody was like ‘I want an infographic’. Sometimes infographics work really well and they’re absolutely right, but there are other times where it’s not going to speak to your audience. Seeing 50 infographics like that, it’s boring. So you need to find another way to talk to them.

Britt: Exactly. Because when you’re sticking solely to something like an infographic, you’re severely limiting your audience. Sometimes infographics might only work on social media channels. They’re very hard to get coverage on from larger publications if it’s not proprietary data maybe, or it just isn’t that right fit. So when you combine that with promotions made for social as well as the general larger publications as well as niche blogs, you’re making a more multi-faceted approach to promotions, which ultimately works out better in the long run.

Jess: Absolutely. So like every time you’ve got something that you want to promote you need to think, ‘Well who do I want to talk to? What do I want to say to them? And then where are they?’ Making an infographic might be completely wrong because they might not use social media where the infographic is shared. So perhaps you need to find a way to get a news story in the newspaper they read, or maybe they hang out on blogs so you need to find out a way to work with bloggers. So as Britt said, it’s not one size fits all.You have to find your audience and then you have to find a way to speak to them.

Jess: Okay, so we’ve talked about why you shouldn’t just latch onto one tactic, but now we’re going to try and give you an example of how you can move away from that and how you can take a multi-faceted approach. So the example we’ve picked is you work for a charity and you want to raise awareness of bullying in schools. So you want to do an anti-bullying campaign. The first thing you need to do is like I said earlier, is think about who do you want to talk to. So who is affected by this. You have got children obviously, they get bullied. Their parents who have to deal with that, and also teachers at school, because they have to deal with that too.

Britt: So maybe a good audience to target would be parenting blogs in this case because you want to go after influencers in the space and those who are trusted by the audience you’re trying to target. So in this case, parenting blogs would be a great place to go after, and in order to get their attention you might want to create useful content that they’ll want to share with other families that read their blogs. Useful resources, guides on how to tell if your child is being bullied for example. So once you get that useful content created and approach these bloggers and they’re sharing this beautiful guide that you’ve created, then you can go even further and create a social media campaign, garnering interest among the social aspect of their followers and those who pay attention to their Twitter, and Facebook, and even StumbleUpon or Instagram.

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. So maybe if you feel like you can do something on Twitter, you could do like a hashtag competition for parents. Maybe they share a hashtag and ultimately they win a prize. Or maybe you could look at targeting kids on Facebook and they could submit poems or artwork, perhaps something like that. And then after you’ve created a buzz around social and you’ve engaged bloggers through specific niches, you can look to create a bigger, wider media story. To do this you would need to actually create a story, so maybe you could do a survey. Maybe you could find and leverage case studies, so you’ve got like human interest angle for the media. But the important thing is is you’re looking at who you want to talk to, and then you’re finding where they are. So are they on Twitter? Are they on Facebook? Do they read the Daily Mail? Or are they reading some kids magazine? So find where your audience is first and then find ways to talk to them.

So that’s what we have for you today, so thanks for watching Distilled Live. I’ve been Jess.